Quilt Feathers Patterns and Techniques

Quilted feathers can add elegance and beauty to your quilt top, and with just a little instruction and practice, anyone can do it. We're gonna start talking by talking about traditional feathers. Traditional feathers are very formal. The full pattern is drafted and marked on your quilt top before you start your quilting, and you start forming or drafting a traditional feather by marking a spine line and a height line, and the different distance between those two determines the size of your feather. Then you'll take some sort of a rounded object, a coin, a quarter in this case, and you will trace the top third of that quarter, all along the height, all along the length of your height line. Once you've done this over and over and over again, that motion will get hardwired in your brain and it will become so natural to you that you'll no longer have to use a quarter to do it. The next step is to make vertical lines perpendicular to the height and spine line. And the reason you add those in is because your feathers start and stop on this vertical line. Once you have those in there you can start forming your feathers. You just make a swoopy swoopy motion. A feather is basically a half of a heart. And the more you do these, the more comfortable you'll become with it. And you'll get to a point where you won't even have to add those vertical reference lines. Be sure you do all of your drafting with a pencil so that you can erase if you make mistakes. Most feathers have the feathers on both sides of the spine line. And the rule of thumb is to offset where your feathers end on the spine line. It's just more pleasing to the eye, and you can see that's what I've done here all along. After you've drafted your feathers to a point where you're really happy with them, then take your black Sharpie marker, and go ahead and outline and draw all of your marks. You can also use this method, as you get a little more comfortable with it and proficient with it, to make feathered cables and feather wreaths. You will then transfer this design onto your quilt top and you can see that you only transfer the actual feather shape and the spine. You don't transfer any of those other registration lines. And we're now ready to quilt our traditional feather. I always start my quilting at the bottom and the right hand side of the feather plume. It just works easiest for me. I'm right-handed. If you're left-handed, you may want to start on the left. And the beauty of these is that the design is all marked and so all you have to do is follow the mark. With one sweeping motion, make your first feather. End of the spine, put your needle down. And then the difficult part about traditional feathers is that you have to backtrack on that stitch line and try to hit it as much as closely as possible. Then you will stop where the two feathers come together, reposition your hands if you need to. And then sew the swooping motion again. Stop at the spine. Backtrack up that stitch, stitch line until you get where the two feathers meet again. Another swoopy motion. Stop at the spine, and just continue that all the way through your feather design. Sometimes you'll have feathers that are very, very long, and to backtrack back along that feather, it takes a lot of work. So what you can do is you can backtrack along this top curve of the feather and along the spine. So let me demonstrate that to you. Instead of going back up on this feather line that you've already stitched, you come up on the spine, then you quilt your feather. Stop where the two feathers come together. And then you backtrack on the top of the feather. Stop where the two feathers come together and make one natural swoop. Stop at the spine. Follow the spine up to the next feather. And then backtrack along the top again. So you can use either method for quilting your traditional feathers, and then just keep going until your design is all quilted. Non-traditional feathers are a little less formal than traditional. And the only thing you mark is the spine and then a little teardrop at the top. Your feathers are formed freehand. So we'll go ahead and quilt the spine. Always stop and reposition your hands when you need to. And then we quilt back down to the bottom and we follow along the spine, but we leave a gap of about an eighth of an inch between. And again, I always form my feathers from the right side and going up. Try to make that nice, pretty rounded curve. And the thing about non-traditional feathers, instead of backtracking along the seam that you've already stitched, you'll again leave about an eighth of an inch between the feathers. And you do that all the way up your spine. Once you get to the top of your feathers, what you'll do is echo quilt down along the top of the feathers. This echo quilting pulls the feathers together and fools the eye into thinking that they are all joined. So once you get to the bottom, then you will just repeat the process on the other side of the feather plume. The last type of feather I'm gonna show you is called a primitive feather. They're very, very informal. You don't mark anything. They're used best on a children's quilt or maybe an art quilt. You just start in the bottom of the area where you want the feathers. There is no spine. You form one feather on one side, and the feathers themselves are a little less formal. And then instead of going up on this side with the feathers, you go ahead and come over on this side and form a feather. And then you continue doing that alternating sides until you have the feather plume as long as you want it. And again, go ahead and echo quilt around the feathers to pull the whole design together. There are many excellent reference books out there for learning how to quilt your feathers by such teachers or authors as Anita Shackelford, Judy Allen and Lee Cleland, just to name a few. So ask your local quilt shop or go online and see how much beauty can be added to your quilt by adding quilted feathers.